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 "I think a lot of the time rappers rap to say they're rapping. I have difficulties with that. We tried to make something different here, but still it's true. I talked with Quincy Jones and he was saying that a lot of rappers are entrepreneurs more than musicians. When musicians were doing just music, they had such a hard training; it was so hard the competition that to emerge you had to be so perfect and so strong. I read this book about the life of Ray Charles, and he was blind in a racist state of America, in the poorest school, without his mother, and he had to overcome so much difficulty that when he became a musician, he had to be the very best. Effectively now in rap music it's very different. But those guys [in Block Party] are real musicians. They have something to say. It's why Dave picked them. They are not like so much on the radio, but what I liked is he didn't care if they were famous or not. What he cared about is he knew them and he respected them."
Although you have directed music videos, you seem lie an unusual choice for Dave Chappelle's Block Party, given the surrealist nature of your work. Why do you think you were asked to the film?
"Well, they asked me to do this documentary because they liked my films, basically, I think. Just because they do hip hop, and they are African-American, that doesn't mean they won't identify with the way relationships are depicted in my films. They do identify.
"But I have been thinking about that a lot. Why should I do it? I don't have any right to speak for them. In a way I think he [Chappelle] protected the project by having a director who wouldn't, like some documentary directors, organise the shoot to express their own opinion. I wanted to be witnessing them and I wanted to give them the opportunity to be free and express themselves. I wanted to put them in situations where they were confronted and had to react. There's a scene, for instance, where I put Wyclef Jean in this little yard with an organ and all these marching band kids, and suddenly he becomes like this preacher. I know he's like that - he likes to give his message - so that's my job, to bring it out and film it. I also put Dave into this completely out of fashion clothes store where the guy has no idea who he is, and Dave put this stupid costume on. I don't know, that's my job, I think.
"At some point we went into a barber that was very nearly kind of Nazi-looking but we didn't keep the footage. It didn't make it to editing. But I think I am very good at reacting to impromptu situations and finding how to make them work, without telling people who they have to be. I do the same with actors. I don't give them directions on who they are. I give them directions on why they are doing something, what they have done the day before, what they will do the day after, stuff like that. I give them as much freedom as possible. I don't want each one of them to be a reflection of me."
Do you feel as free when you make a documentary as when you make your feature films, or is part of the fun adapting your sensibility to this different form?
"I think it's part of the fun to adapt my sensibility to this form. And especially in this case it's Dave Chappelle's Block Party, so it's really around him. He initiated it. He was the spirit of it. He was the energy of it. I wanted to capture that. But sometimes I would help him to go a little deeper in his questioning, to carry on and push a subject. I learned that at the same time as he did, because he doesn't do interviews, and nor do I. It's a specific job. So if I had to do another one, I would like to do another one and go deeper. At first I was very shy and I would not ask questions myself. But then I had to interview Dave so I had to be the one to ask the questions and I realised I could actually do it.
"There is nothing worse than a journalist that has written all these questions and no matter what answer you give, he goes to the next question. He just kills the conversation. You say something and you lead the conversation in one direction, and the journalist has to listen and respond to it and go deeper; you want to explore deeper and deeper and that's what makes an interview unique. It's like a tree. You follow one branch and then another and then another, and you go into a very specific place. If you have only your questions, it's like a building: you have the next stage, the next stage, the next stage, and you have only one result. So I learned that and I got to a point where I could react to this discovery as I was shooting to adapt to it."
Were there things about Dave that surprised you as you were going deeper in your conversations?
"Sometimes he was a little lost, I remember. He is so solicited by everybody from left to right that he could lose his focus. I remember I went to see his show and between the takes everybody was [mimics camera's snapping] and he was just there being like a chid, and I really liked this quality. But you could also see how his brain reacts to a situation. I have now seen the documentary many times and I can see the ‘click' when he as the idea and it's so fast. He sees a situation and bing, he has the idea. Like when he's playing basketball and he says, ‘Okay, we're going to set up this racial issue. We're gonna play these Whiteys for freedom.' He got the idea in a second and that's how his show works. He is always bouncing back to people's reactions."
Is that something that links you both?
"Yeah, I guess that's something that links us, the way that we react to what we see and adapt. We keep spontaneous, if only in a restricted configuration."
Music plays a very big role in the whole of your career and also your life. Your father owned a music instrument shop and you've played in bands. Wat does music mean to you?
"To me it relieves emotion that you have deep inside. I think music, as well, especially pop music, is made to crystallise your emotion, to fix your emotion, in a very basic and stupid way. Like when they bombard you with one song during the summer and you're on holiday, and you get to have a relationship with a girl, which never happened to me. I mean meeting a girl on my holidays when I was an adolescent. So, for me, it would reflect my frustration. Which is still an emotion [laughs]. Later on you play this song and you remember kissing this girl or watching this girl. . ."
Or feeling frustrated.
"Yeah, exactly. I remember like this Gerry Rafferty song, with the saxophone [mimics the riff], Baker Street, because I had so much a feeling of rejection associated with this music."
You talked about being spontaneous. When did you start trusting your instincts? Often you start out insecure and only later learn to trust them.
"It's a good question. It's a long process, and I think it's something you learn with the years. At the same time you feel your brain is getting a little slower as you get older. You feel that your instinct, if you learn to use your instinct, you can compensate with it and get even faster. You accumulate your experience. You learn to find who you are.
"I have been doing film and videos for maybe 20 years, I mean sporadically. Before I was doing drawing and painting and I had the opportunity to start to do larger films at an advanced age. I started at 35, I guess. All directors compare themselves to Orson Welles, who did his masterpiece at 26. When you start and you're nearly 40, you're like, ‘Oh fuck, I'm so behind.' But then I put all my videos together for a DVD, and I realised, ‘OK, it could be one of piece of work', because I was expressing myself in all of them, although not necessarily knowing it, because I was illustrating songs from other people. But I realised they were connected.
"Before that I would sometimes doubt myself because I had to collaborate with so many people, and I'd hear people saying, ‘Oh, it's all Charlie Kaufman, he has no talent.' I read that when I did my first film [Human Nature] and it was difficult to live with. So I would look back and see what I have done that exactly defined myself, and I remember, for instance, when I was doing my first job in animation, we always wasted a lot of time doing caricatures, and I had done a caricature of everybody in the studio using a matchbox, a cheese box, a can, and doing the minimum I could do, and you could recognise everyone. It was nearly on the edge of abstraction, but it was enough information so that you could say, ‘Oh, this is Stefan, this Etienne, or this is such and such.' Sometimes I think of that and I think, ‘I didn't know anybody who had done that and it came from my imagination, so that was me.' You don't want to be too much aware of your instinct but on the other hand sometimes it's good to realise that you have your voice and you have your style, and keep that in mind to give you the confidence to carry on doing your stuff."
So was it an issue with Charlie Kaufman that people questioned what you did?
"Yeah, it was difficult sometimes. It was difficult. On the other hand I don't think I could have done a movie on my own at that time. I don't think I could have had the courage or the option to do it. When I met him, we immediately thought we had a lot in common. We had a conversation for hours about our relationships, about our pains, our rejection, our concept. He had ideas that were so genius. He would tell me an idea and I would have an idea that was complimentary. So it was great. Collaboration is great, especially if you collaborate with people who give you inspiration and let you be who you are.
"It's like I used to collaborate a lot with Bjork. But, at some point, you start to question, or people question for you, are you bringing anything? And working with Charlie, I had to explain things. Maybe it's because he's from America and things need to be explained there [I laugh]. It's true. You have to justify everything. They don't really like surrealist cinema because surrealist cinema is a cinema that you don't analyse. It is a cinema or painting or whatever that you just pick what's inside you and put it out there and it's self-explanatory, most of the time. Basically, you want to be surprised by what you see, the same way you're surprised in your dream. But with Charlie I had to explain, which was interesting because I had to learn how to articulate every idea.
"I was happy with The Science of Sleep [he wrote it alone] in the sense of being able to just go out there and take the chance to do something completely stupid, but at least it's coming from me. There is not any filter in between what I experienced in my head and what I put on the screen."
How did you decide the ways that you would shoot the musicians? You mentioned after the screening that in older films they only had one camera and did a lot in the editing room. Were there any films that influenced you here?
"I just wanted to see music films that made an impact on me and try to understand why they made an impact. I always refer to this example because it's easiest. I remember Monterey Pop, with Janis Joplin, this concert was not organised to be filmed, it was organised to be a concert, and they happened to have one or two cameras there. Therefore the camera had to be held on what the cameraman felt was the most important thing at the time he was shooting. So you had a five-minute shot on Janis Joplin, and the thing is it's amazing. It's stronger than if they had a quick cut to the high-hat, a quick cut to the guitar, to the drum, and I think they had to do it because they had no choice. I think it takes a lot to do something like that now if you have the opportunity to have cameras everywhere. So I wanted to get this energy. And if you want to get this energy, you have to have somebody on the microphone that is going to deliver. It's like when Jill Scott is up there, she doesn't move at all. She's not like skinny or sexy, like Janis Joplin was not as well, but she has one thing, her incredible voice. And charisma as well. She looks at people without moving and she gives with her look as well a lot of energy.
What do you think about rappers and rap culture in general?
"Well, I think a lot of the time they're rapping to say they're rapping [laughs]. I have difficulties with that."
Some people have said rap is just another form of blaxploitation.
"It's true. But we tried to make something different here. But it's true. I talked with Quincy Jones lately and he was saying that a lot of rappers are entrepreneurs more than musicians. When musicians were doing just music, they had such a hard training; it was so hard the competition that to emerge you had to be so perfect and so strong. I read the life of Ray Charles, because I had a friend who played with him, and I got this book a few years ago, and he was blind in a racist state of America, in the poorest school, without his mother, and he has to overcome so much difficulty that when he becomes a musician, he has to be the very best. Effectively now in rap music it's very different.
"But those guys [in Block Party] are real musicians. They have something to say. It's why Dave picked them. They are not like so much on the radio - not all of them, obviously, Kanye [West] and the Fugees - but mostly they're people you don't hear so much. What I liked is he didn't care if they were famous or not. What he cared about is he knew them and he respected them."
You shoot on film rather than video. Why?
"For two reasons: you still have more definition. Even if it's Super-16mm, when you project it big, it's still much more defined than video. And when you shoot on film, you have to commit more. You create a tension that you don't have on video. And this tension gives adrenalin and pushes people. Even if the goal is to get people to be normal, and it takes, in general, 20 minutes before somebody starts to say something that is personal, in the beginning they're just showing off, it's good that you're wasting this film because it accumulates a tension that is relieved when it starts to click in.
"In terms of me, the director, I shoot all this footage and I see the boxes piling up, and I'm like, ‘Fuck, there's nothing to use there.' Like this first day we shot, we had so little to work with. It seems that we have a lot now, but when we were shooting it seemed like we had so little. At the end of the day when we saw the marching band and we had all of this big suspense about if they could come or not come, and then they have this big relief when they learn they can come to the concert and play, it was great we had shot that on film, because I was so worried I had wasted this film. When we actually got it, I was sharing this joy on different levels. I was sharing this joy because I had something in the camera that was good. So I think shooting on film is a little heavier but it puts you more on the edge and you're more reactive.
Is it also the same thing for something like The Science of Sleep where you use a lot of handmade animation rather than use CGI?
"Well it's a different thing for Science of Sleep where I use animation, because it's sort of my dream. I make my dream. I always liked fabric objects. Somebody asked me what was like my definition of making movies, what's the best thing about making movies, and I said, ‘Build something small and project it big.' A lot of people, they like to shoot something big and then project it on small screens. They like big landscapes, big landmarks, and I understand that too. But I think it's more magical like I can imagine this thing is a building block and this is a car [using plastic bottle tops and microphones for illustration] and you put the camera here and then project it here. You made it."
You're a model maker.
"Yeah, exactly. I like that. When I was a kid and going on holidays I always wanted to go back to Paris and make the landscape I had seen. I was doing some river with this ripple glass, and you paint blue underneath, you put plaster on, you put sand, or you use woodchips for the grass. I always liked that. Now I'm making movies I still like to do that."
DAVE CHAPPELLE'S BLOCK PARTY IS OUT NOW
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